If I were an Atheist

[AdamLOV]

The point is that scientific and religious "facts" alike are constructed by the truth-building activities of specialists. What becomes truth is what has gone through officially sanctioned channels of translation...[A]mong the Inca, priests decides what constituted evidence of, say, a dog having mystical properties. The two systems of knowledge are different, but neither may be considered any less true. Because truth (and truth criteria) are social constructs does not make them invalid...

I thoroughly subscribe to this point of view. Without absolute truth standards to say that "science is true while religion is false" makes no sense. However, it's also true that you can't do a bioassay using Inca methods. I don't want my doctors to get stupid and prescribe religious healing for my leg abscess when religion isn't the appropriate tool. We can say objectively that Inca healing tools were much less effective than modern medicine when it comes to prolonging life and physiological health.

That is most probably correct, although we have no reliable data on life expectancy in the Inca Empire. The real issue is whether a culture attaches significance to prolonging life at all costs. It stands to reason that cultures capable of prolonging life develop methods of doing so, but this says nothing about whether prolonging the human lifespan is actually, morally speaking, "good". The goodness of such procedures is something we ourselves attach to life-prolonging prostheses and operations. Therefore secular, techno-scientific societies cannot be considered "better" than the Inca Empire or hunter-gatherer societies. Rather, they are more effective at prolonging human life. That said, someone even more skeptical than us could interject that because of the inevitable overpopulation that corresponds to heightened effectiveness of medicine, the longevity of current generations could very well have been attained at the cost.of significantly shortening the lifespan of homo sapiens as a whole. The technology that prolongs the lives of human individuals now is manufactured, for the most part, in ecologically unsustainable ways. Therefore it could easily be the case that from a species perspective, societies based on techno-scientific rationality are not even more effective than,say, hunter-gatherer societies.